I bought a brand new iMac on Tuesday. I'm pretty sure this will come as a surprise to some, so I figured I might as well offer some background information about this choice - maybe it'll help other people who are also pondering what to buy as their next computer.

I find it interesting that most people seem to either build their desktops themselves or buy mass-produced commercial ones.

Considering that my next desktop will serve fairly exotic use cases and that I don't like playing with hardware much, I have been thinking for some time about a third option : going to some local computer shop that I trust, telling them what I want, getting a price and a component list from them, and quickly checking on the web if their proposal makes sense before accepting their offer.

This way, I get all the benefits of a homemade machine for relatively little extra cost (the cost of manpower is generally relatively cheap with respect as compared to that of the various components), yet all the homework I have left to do is to enumerate my use cases and read some reviews of the most sensitive components (PSU, storage...). Sounds like a balanced solution to me, so why do so few people around here seem to do it ?